A Year in Reading: Nick Moran

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“I would’ve been a rich man if it hadn’t been for Florida.” — Henry Flagler

Congratulations! You’ve founded the most successful company in the history of industry, and you’re rich beyond imagination. What do you do now? Do you do something traditional, like your partner, John D. Rockefeller, and reinvest your capital to secure an empire for your family? Or do you do something bold, something creative? How about developing a new hotel? Sounds great! Even better: you could build two of them, among the finest ever been built — the Ponce de León in St. Augustine, and the Royal Poinciana in Palm Beach. You can call your friend Thomas Edison, who’s recently harnessed residential electricity, and have him install light fixtures so new and so foreign to your guests that they refuse to flip the switches themselves because they’re terrified of being electrocuted. Marvelous! Splendid! But now you find that even this doesn’t do it. No, not quite. Your ambition is insatiable. You direct your attention to the state at large, to its pristine Eastern coastline, stretching 350 miles from Jacksonville to the end of the mainland, where an unnamed town exists as just a speck on a map — a place populated by fewer than 500 people. This place is great, you think. Why not share its splendor with the masses? Why not make it so that anyone with the money can traverse the sunny coast by rail? This could be the next great American frontier! This could be the country’s greatest tourist attraction! New Yorkers and Ohioans (like yourself) could come down in the winter months to rest their heels in the sand, to fish in the daytime and wait out the snow. And as a businessman — or at least that’s what you call yourself — you think of the return on investment. You think of pineapples shipped north from the perpetual warm weather. You think of oranges and sugar. Perfect! You form another company, the Florida East Coast Railway. You do what you set out to do. By 1896, a train leaving Jackonsville in the morning can arrive at the foot of Biscayne Bay that night. The town starts booming, so much so that its grateful settlers offer to name it after you. “Flagler,” you think, has a nice ring to it, but you’re a modest man — or so you tell yourself — and so you ask that they keep the place’s Native title of “Mayaimi,” or “Big Water,” inspired by the state’s great inland sea, Lake Okeechobee, located 80 miles to the north. It’s all falling into place now. It’s gelling together, except again you’re bored. You need excitement. Come on, now! You’re the second wealthiest man on the planet. You are quickly becoming the most significant person to ever set foot in Florida: four years ago, you persuaded the state’s legislature to alter their constitution, to make “incurable insanity” into acceptable grounds for divorce. You did this because, at 61 years old, you’ve fallen in love with a 23 year old and you need to get out of your second marriage. (The law is repealed immediately after you go through with it.) So you get back to scheming and again your gaze turns southward. This time, you notice the state’s busiest and most populous city, which also happens to be its southernmost: Key West. This, you think, is your chance to leave a real legacy, to reshape not only the state you’ve adopted as your own, but also the nation itself. By extending your railway 128 miles south from its current terminus in Miami, you’ll be able to harness the potential of the nation’s 13th-busiest shipping port. A couple problems, is all. One, how the Hell do you build a railroad over the ocean? The islands between Key West and Miami are faintly islands at all; they’re limestone and coral-encrusted speed bumps for waves. Their highest point is 16 feet above sea level, but the majority sits between three and four. Miles of open water span between each one, so you’re going to have to hopscotch your way down to the Conch Republic. Two, the proposed route will cost more than the 742-mile California installment of the Union Pacific Railroad. Three, it’s hurricane season. Four, you’re getting pretty old. No matter, you think. We’ve done it before; we’ll do it again. But how, exactly? For that, you’ll need to read Les Standiford’sLast Train to Paradise, the best book I’ve read all year.

Arthur Phillips is the bestselling author of The Egyptologist and Prague, which was a New York Times Notable Book and winner of the Los Angeles Times Art Seidenbaum Award for First Fiction. His most recent novel, Angelica, comes out in paperback in February.I admit to having bought a book for its cover. For years I had seen the four spines of Anthony Powell'sA Dance to the Music of Time lined up on bookstore shelves and admired them, wished the spines - which together form a Poussin painting - were up on my own. And so I bought the first book, dove in for no reason except coveting the covering, without having any idea what I was about to read.I emerged from the fourth volume six months later, having read nothing but Powell in the intervening time, and having completed one of the great reading experiences of my life, truly distraught that it was over.Pretentious claim, for which I apologize, but here it is: a few years earlier, I read the whole damn In Search of Lost Time (or whatever you want to call it), and the payoff at its end, after all the toil and pleasure, is no more powerful than a similar payoff at the end of Powell. You finish both with the sensation of having spent a long lifetime at the side of the narrator. You have the same feeling of nostalgia, profundity, passing years, lives led and finished, the power of a master of letters guiding you to the illusion of lived experience.That said, Powell is also funny, really funny, which is a claim I do not think can be made for Proust without straining something - credulity or a groin muscle.More from A Year in Reading 2007

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Another portrait of Miami is Back to Blood by Tom Wolfe. Wolfe takes on the denizens of South Florida, all classes all cultures, and the satire is outrageous, close to the bone, and very very funny. His best since Bonfire.

I had high hopes for Back to Blood when it first came out, and the opening pages were Wolfe at his best. The early set piece with the sports car and the angry driver is authentic Miami through and through. But over the course of the book, some flaws stood out to me, and I wound up less happy with how everything came together. Overall I saw it as pretty inconsistent, and there were some problematic areas I wasn’t particularly fond of, but it’s definitely a valuable addition to the Florida canon.

I kept a reading journal for the first time this year and I highly recommend it. It’s humbling for one (that’s all I read?), inspiring (read more!), and clarifying (choose well). That said, it was a pretty great year reading-wise. I read David Mitchell’sBlack Swan Green twice, re-read Turgenev’sFirst Love, William Gass’On Being Blue, and Don DeLillo’sEnd Zone, and I highly recommend them all. With everything going on with the Penn State scandal, Margaux Fragoso’s harrowing memoir of sexual abuse, Tiger, Tiger is both timely and even more devastating. I finally read Jeffrey Eugenides’The Virgin Suicides and thought it was terrific. I took Ann Patchett’s advice at the opening of Parnassus, her independent bookstore in Nashville, and bought Denis Johnson’sTrain Dreams, devouring it in a single sitting. I had so much fun reading The Stories of John Cheever in conjunction with The Journals of John Cheever that I read Saul Bellow’sThe Adventures of Augie March in tandem with his Letters, which includes a wonderful introduction by its editor, Benjamin Taylor. J.M. Coetzee’sDisgrace — my first experience with his work — was riveting, appalling, and beautiful. Jim Shepard’s story collection Like You’d Understand, Anyway was so wide-reaching, variegated, and emotionally precise I felt like I’d read a collection of micro-novels.
Still, of all the books I read, only Cormac McCarthy’sBlood Meridian took over my world, and by that I mean I had that rare experience, while immersed in it, of seeing reality through its lens whenever I put it down and in the days after I finished it. Ostensibly it’s about a band of Indian hunters run amok along the Texas-Mexico border in the mid-nineteenth century but really it’s about how man’s natural state is warfare. You can buy that bill of goods or not but like McCarthy’s greatest works (Suttree, The Crossing) it’s written in his inimitable style, that fusion of The Book of Isaiah, Herman Melville, and Faulkner (though he’s more precise than the latter, more desolate and corporeal than Moby Dick’s author; whether his prophetic powers are on par with his artistry remains to be seen), a voice which is all his own, of course, and has an amplitude I’ve encountered only in, what, DeLillo at his most ecstatic? Murakami at his most unreal? Bellow in Augie March or Herzog? Alice Munro in The Progress of Love? John Hawkes in The Lime Twig? Read it if you read anything this coming year and note: a bonus to the experience is that you’ll add at least two hundred words to your lexicon.
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Dan Kois edits Vulture, New York magazine's arts and culture blog.Like many people who work in publishing, feed off of publishing, or report on publishing, I'm constantly reading months or even years ahead. So my 2007 reading experience was unlike that of many of your correspondents; rarely could I find time to dip into the past. When I did, it was to re-read works that had given me great pleasure: the funny and sad novels of Tom Drury, for a profile I still swear to God I will eventually write; Harry Potter and His Dark Materials, in preparation for the final volume of the former and the film of the latter. I read comics systematically and comprehensively this year for the first time, and loved dozens and dozens of them, sometimes feeling like a reading cheater in my ability to rip through an entire satisfying story in an hour or less. But the best book I read all this year is a book that isn't even coming out until next year: Child 44 by Tom Rob Smith, a thriller set in the darkest days of Stalinist Russia, one of the finest intersections of historical setting and propulsive plot I've read in a long time. It's a book that transcends the serial killer genre and becomes a difficult, complicated work of art in its own right.More from A Year in Reading 2007